Ketley, he tells me, has been on the road for a
week, in a car covered with mud and clothes that have never come off.

_Friday the Sixth_

There is no news of my Dinkie. And _that_, I remind myself, is the
only matter that counts.

Lois Murchison drove up to-day in her hateful big car. She did not
find me a very agreeable hostess, I'm afraid, but curled up like a
nonchalant green snake in one of my armchairs and started to smoke and
talk. She asked where Duncan was and I had to explain that he'd been
called out to the mines on imperative business. And that started her
going on the mines. Duncan, she said, should clean up half a million
before he was through with that deal. He had been very successful.

"But don't you feel, my dear," she went on with quiet venom in her
voice, "that a great deal of his success has depended on that
bandy-legged little she-secretary of his?"

"Is she that wonderful?" I asked, trying to seem less at sea than I
was.

"She's certainly wonderful to him!" announced the woman known as
Slinkie. And having driven that poisoned dart well into the flesh,
she was content to drop her cigarette-end into the ash-receiver, reach
for her blue-fox furs, and announce that she'd have to be toddling on
to the hair-dresser's.

Lois Murchison's implication, at that moment, didn't bother me much,
for I had bigger troubles to occupy my thoughts. But the more I dwell
on it, the more I find myself disturbed in spirit. I resent the idea
of being upset by a wicked-tongued woman. She has, however, raised a
ghost which will have to be laid. To-morrow I intend to go down to my
husband's office and see his secretary, "to inspect the whaup," as
Whinnie would express it, for I find myself becoming more and more
interested in her wonderfulness.... Peter sent me a hurried line or
two to-day, telling me to sit tight as he thought he'd have news for
me before the week was out.

I suspect him of trying to trick me into some forlorn new lease of
hope. But I have pinned my faith to Peter--and I know he would not
trifle with anything so sacred as mother-love.

_Saturday the Seventh_

There is no news of my Dinkie.... But there is news of another
nature.

Between ten and eleven this morning I had Hilton motor me down to
Duncan's office in Eighth Avenue. It struck me as odd, at first, that
I had never been there before. But Duncan, I remembered, had never
asked me, the domestic fly, to step into his sp